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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

> AI slop,

Now I know there are issues with the field and how just answering these questions may cause broader problems, but I feel like the posted results is far from slop. We can't just call any output slop, or it loses all meaning.

If it was slop, it'd not be causing the issues the group are concerned about - they're not saying "the problem is we're getting loads of incorrect proofs thrown about that are nonsense".

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When you blanket a set of things with a pejorative, and it turns out that some of the members of that set are demonstrably and definitively NOT covered by that pejorative, and that all the pejorative means at bottom is "I don't like", all you've accomplished in the long run is to call into question any future legitimate use of that pejorative. It is tempting, especially when heated, to stretch an invective, but it will ironically only lead to the death of its utility over time.

So the fact that the Library of Babel (i.e. all possible books) contains occasional gems means that you can't object to using it on principle? That would seem to follow from your logic.

What about a filtered set "all well formed books"? Or "all well formed books that are plausible enough that they could convince a reasonable person, regardless of their accuracy"?

It's generally taken that a cup of sewage in a barrel of wine makes a barrel of sewage. Surely a reasonable person could claim that a barrel of sewage was still sewage, even if it contained several cups of wine?

This is just not how math has ever worked and seems like a completely incorrect lens to apply to this situation.

I personally just find it hilarious how the complaints and excuses against AI have slowly marched and changed from 2023 to now.

I find it hilarious how people seem to think spending enormous effort to fix obvious failures, only to immediately uncover a new round of obvious failures is a recipe for exponential takeoff. So I guess we're both going to be pretty amused over the next few years, huh?

They're not calling any output slop, they're calling indecipherable output slop. The management class responsible for hiring, firing, and paying people doesn't possess the domain knowledge to say for certain whether or not LLM output is optimal (which, in this context, means correct), but they will trust that it's good enough to justify further automation / fewer grant approvals / etc. So in that sense, slop can and will cause the economic issues people are concerned about.

University boards want the prestige of successful research programs. Doing the hard work to get something demonstrably true is going to lose out economically in this paradigm, where we are all being conditioned to uncritically ooh and aah at the incantations being elicited from these magic boxes. The oracles even have legions of zealots who will berate you for not being sufficiently deferential and reverent, or worse, accuse you of blasphemy. If for no other reason, I agree with using the term to express all of the above succinctly, even if LLMs can be helpful tools generally.

<< The management class responsible for hiring, firing, and paying people doesn't possess the domain knowledge to say for certain whether or not LLM output is optimal

To be fair, management rarely possessed domain knowledge in rudimentary management.

In the context of maths papers, the term has come to refer to papers having the shortcomings that are, for whatever reason, typical of LLM out, including things like using non-standard terminology all over the place, emphasizing easy steps while leaping over harder ones, having bizarre organisation, and, importantly, failing to properly cover existing work and as a result being hard to tell from plagiarism.

The degree to which these issues feature will differ, but it is generally the case that converting the output to proper research requires significant effort, hence the AGMAI recommendations being what they are, and not performing that effort tends to come off as laziness or incompetence, so I can see how slop has become the popular term.

> We can't just call any output slop, or it loses all meaning.

The term “ai slop” is not supposed to discriminate good ai output from bad, the entire purpose of the phrase is a blanket term that delegitimizes all ai output.

That is not how it is generally being used.

That is exactly how I see it generally being used. Why else would people be dismissing work as AI slop without even reading it, discovering what it says, or even looking into how and to what extent AI was used in a project? Saying things like "if you didn't write it I won't read it" at the first whiff of an AI smell is absolutely said to delegitimize all ai output.

Or in this specific case, why would someone call these proofs (no one is saying they are wrong) AI slop if not to delegitimize all AI output?

This. There's a large subset of people who, seemingly consciously, try to delegitimize anything related to AI by calling it* "slop".

* even pretty amazing advances like this one

AI Derangement Syndrome

People call some work AI slop "without even reading it" when the intention/substance of the work might exist somewhere buried within a wall of impenetrable LLM text (aka "the slop").

Good AI output is indistinguishable from human output. The whiff you mention is the reasoning pleonasm and tautology (intended) escaping into the output and the "author" not proof-reading/editing it out.

But it also happens in many other contexts where that is not true, such as this one right now. Bringing me back to my point that it’s not to discriminate and clarify between good and bad, but to muddy the water.

We can't argue the latter without quantifying the former. All terms are misused by someone, but if it's statistically insignificant that's not an issue. I'm not convinced this one is sufficiently misused to detract from the common definition.

How is it not true here? Plenty of papers in this release are hard to follow, use non-standard terminology, make hard to understand leaps, and so forth.

This is a feat of superhuman intelligence, completed by a state of the art computer system. It's just done something humans long thought impossible (again), and the future is looking more like the ones science fiction has dreamt of for decades.

Sorry you don't like the phrasing.

I mean, this is possible, but it seems quite unlikely if you take a good impartial look. It's nothing I personally dislike, in fact I enjoy LLMs when they are understood as what they are, which is a tool.

What I do not don are these rose-tinted, thought-terminating glasses which make people assume that this just must be an impenetrable product of superhuman intelligence.

> it seems quite unlikely if you take a good impartial look.

I have no idea what you mean by this? The experts, including many here, don't seem to think it's unlikely.

1) Many humans labored for many years to solve these problems and did not.

2) Something else did solve at lest some of these problems.

3) The thing that did wasn't human.

What else do you need to know before you can allow yourself to be happy just to live in such an exciting time?

I was responding to a comment from a person claiming this is not an example where the "intention/substance of the work might exist somewhere buried within a wall of impenetrable LLM text". I am saying this is in fact the case, given human experts almost universally agree that the papers are badly written, with inscrutable, hard to follow logic.

I had initially understood you as saying that this inscrutable logic was merely a consequence of superhuman intelligence, which is what I deemed unlikely. I don't see experts agreeing with that position either.

I am not unhappy about this result, but I am somewhat unhappy about it being dumbed down, decontextualised and understood without any nuance.

The other reason is to delegitimize the word slop. If everything is slop, then nothing is slop. So some AI supporters also just call everything slop.

> The term “ai slop” is not supposed to discriminate good ai output from bad, the entire purpose of the phrase is a blanket term that delegitimizes all ai output.

Then it's a useless term and we should all stop using it.

There's plenty of AI output that isn't called slop. Because people don't know it's AI output. The people doing things that are poor and obviously AI are just upset that the bar hasn't dropped.

I've read some of the results papers (the Einstein condensate one and the pi exponential one). I'm not an expert but it definitely wasn't AI slop. The introduction sections were particularly well framed and informative.

Also you can see in the papers where an idea is introduced but in the bibliography you can see where the foundational idea comes from. So the narratives are not unmotivated as some claim (proof without intuition claims).

A good starting definition for slop might be "It requires more effort for its reader / audience to understand than it took its notional author to create."

https://karansag.org/2026/08/01/no-one-wants-to-read-your-sl...

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